Witness the tragicomedy of the FBI this week trying to shoehorn the issues around encryption into a 1977 law designed for telephone line surveillance.

Which history are we in danger of repeating, anyway? The '68 nomination of the eminently electable HHHumphrey, or the '72 nomination of crazy loony lefty McGovern?

Fact is, both lost.

In 2004 we nominated the smart choice and lost, 2008 we nominated the "you'd be crazy to---" guy and won.

There's enough examples throughout history to justify just about anybody's argument. In the meantime, every once in a while it's helpful to remind the DUnizens of crankyshuffle dufferboardville - of which I am a proud citizen, myself - that this century belongs, first and foremost, to those born in it.

And it is undeniable that they have had a bone to pick with apple's end-user encryption since it was implemented. I simply do not believe that a) whatever is on this now-deceased person's phone; which I suspect the government already has a good idea about, anyway- is worth the extraordinary effort they're putting into it, other than they want to either establish a precedent OR obtain by any means necessary the tools or knowhow to get around this encryption scheme they don't like... and b) I think the principle of privacy and security is a valid one for a number of reasons already laid out- I am going to proudly side with not just Silicon Valley but also the EFF on these matters, every time.

I believe law enforcement can keep us safe just fine without having to have a magic key into everyone's shit; and it's worth noting that even when they do have these near-omniscient powers they keep demanding, again, they DON'T use them to keep us safe, but like I said, they use em to go after low level drug users.

The Feds or the NSA dont need super secret illegal powers to spy on El Chapo, anyway. It's the person smoking the bong in their basement (or the journalist that has written the article deemed 'subversive') that are the focal points of these, again, extra-legal and extra-constitutional activities. And honestly we all should have learned these lessons long ago, from J. Edgar Hoover, Nixon, and COINTELPRO.

Had Afghanistan achieved the implied objective, namely actually capturing or eliminating those directly responsible for 9-11, OBL in particular... had we achieved that objective quickly and with focus and single-minded determination; and (this is important) had we not left that country in the deteriorated condition it is in today, perhaps by taking some of the massive amounts of largesse we wasted in Iraq and instead using it to build schools, water treatment facilities, and infrastructure for the people of that long-abused nation, then I think that a decent case could be made for military action (which many of us, such as myself, supported at the time) in that situation as well.

But that's a pretty fucking slim menu for the past 60+ years of US history. Far more frequent have been misbegotten clusterfucks like Vietnam.

So heaven forfend we- as a nation already running a massive deficit, that certainly the anti-Sanders folks around here seem to believe pays too much in taxes as it is- should elect someone to the White House who is REAL FUCKIN' JUDICIOUS about when and where and what circumstances in which to use military force.

It's easy to say "bah, bomb em all", and it gets the '5 minutes of low information' voters every time. What is hard is actually thinking about these things and the consequences 10, 20 years down the road.

We're still paying off the consequences of the last shitty war, which Hillary voted for.

We had an entire fucking year of "town hall" dithering over health care, which did nothing except give an opportunity for every mushmouthed nut with a tricorner hat to stand up in front of a tv camera and blargle yargle bargle blarg.

Heavens! Well, we can't be hasty, here. We only have a clear majority in both houses of congress AND the White House, and a mandate from the voters. Heaven fucking FORFEND we should actually use it.. tick tock, tick tock, tick tock..."oh, it's 2010 already, how did that happen?"

Sure. And given that they're all raving misogynist racist purple shirt wearing mac fanboy brogressives afflicted with white male pathology who barely have time to put gas in their broke-ass Rand Paul Sticker covered volvo klanmobiles before driving their elitist entitled selves to the library to check out atlas shrugged and getting on the public computers there to hate-swarm everything that is pure and decent on social media (and look at porn, probably) after which they commit a series of microaggressions and then head down to the local venezuelan embassy to declare their undying love for Stalin and Hugo Chavez, before finally dining on a feast of cornflake-covered brofurkey....

can you imagine how those *********s would react if they WERE called names?

And in the meantime, all this authoritarian-appeasing talk about "we must do something about encryption" is damaging the economy, because not just American businesses but our customers overseas have watched these conversations, and they DEPEND on American products and their built in encryption to protect their data against shit like industrial espionage. Fuck, every time you log into your credit card's website, you're using encryption. We WANT encryption to be strong, and we don't want to think that there is a built in weakness waiting for malicious actors to discover and exploit it.

Silicon Valley's resistance to talk from people who clearly don't understand the topic is not just some tech-libertarian philosophical pose, it is a meat and potatoes business decision. Encryption, the math, the concepts, all of it- is out there and it is not going away. Silicon Valley wants to SELL products to the world that the world will reliably believe are genuinely secure and not compromised out of the box.